Site
8 is on private land and is not very photogenic, so here is a fine example
of a ringfort from Streedagh, about 15 km to the north.

Site 8

Site 8 at Carrowmore is in fact a ringfort, with a diameter of 30 meters, and
not a megalithic monument. However, Borlase provides quite a bit of information
which some may find interesting:

No. 8 (Caltragh or sepulchral rath), further to the northeast, and west of the road.
"This circle is 90 feet in diameter, and is most probably sepulchral,
though it has somewhat the appearance of a fort, or raheen, the surrounding
stones being nearly buried in a clay bank There are no remains of a cromleac
in it." - Petrie.

"One
side has been nearly all removed." - Wood-Martin.

Petrie
calls this a "Fort, or Raheen." It is a monument of the same
kind as the so-called Cealluras, Keels, and Killeens of other parts, but
the fact that it is surrounded by stones nearly buried in the bank seems
to mark it as transitional between the stone-circle and the earthen enclosure.

"A peasant in the neighbourhood stated that in his youth old people
used to recount how, on certain nights in the year, lights were to be
seen in this 'ould fort,' and noises heard as if contending armies were
engaged in fray. This legend is by no means peculiar to Carrowmore, but
is to be met with in nearly every district in Ireland."

I discovered
a very remarkable instance of its existence in Cornwall. Lights were said
to come out of a great pile of stones on the summit of the cliff at Ballowal,
over Cape Cornwall, and to dance around it. This pile was apparently composed
merely of mine refuse; but, on excavating it (being led to make trial
of it by the legend), I found this only to be a surface-coating, and the
whole of the interior to be occupied by a vast sepulchral cairn, containing
a dolmen, stone cists, and a double-walled dome. So constant had been
the tradition of fairy-lights coming out of it that people of the elder
generation were afraid to pass it at night.

The large ringfort at the south edge of Carrowmore.

In
Ireland the "little people" of two neighbouring forts or lioses
were said to quarrel. Their battles took place by night, and the name
Lisnascragh, or Fort of Screeching - given to several forts (according
to Mr. Joyce), in the North of Ireland, was said to be derived from the noises
they made. From the candles shining in them the names of some of these
places, namely, Lisnagannell and Lisnagunnell, were popularly, but erroneously,
derived.

In
Japan, the battles of the Kami*, or ancestral spirits, otherwise called
Shinto, the exact parallels of the Lappish Sitte, the Irish Sidhe, and
the Norse Elves, are said to take place with great noise in the air, and
the stone arrow-heads found on the sea-shore after a storm are said to
be those discharged in the conflict.

Col. Wood-Martin is inclined to regard
monuments of the class of No. 8 as the ferta of the medieval books, and
a passage in the Book Armagh speaks of "the circular ditch, like
to a fert, in which the Scottish people and Gentiles used to bury their
dead," as equivalent to what the Christian Irish called a "Releg"
(Lat. reliquae), which was certainly, in some cases, an enclosure round
a cemetery, as at Glendalough, in Wicklow.

I should be more inclined,
however, to regard a "fert" as one of those smaller earthen
rings, some 10 feet in internal diameter, which are to be found plentifully
in many parts of Ireland, and examples of which occur between Carrowmore
and Knocknarea. They are held in great reverence by the peasantry, supposed
to be sepulchral, and are never disturbed.

*This
word Kanzi is, I think, connected with the Bear and the worship of that
animal among almost all the peoples bordering on the Arctic Ocean. It
would have reached Japan through the Ainos of Yesso from the Kamscadal
promontory, where the word actually means "bear".

There
is evidence of the worship of the Bear among the Lapps and Finns of Northern
Scandinavia and Finland. Both these people called themselves Samelat,
or, more correctly, Suomalaiset, i.e. Suoma-men. Now, among the Samoyedes,
whose language is regarded as a classic type of Finno-Ugric speech, Szlom,
or som, is a "bear," so that Suoma-men would be "Bearmen,"
and Othere was probably only translating for Alfred the name of the natives
for themselves when he spoke of the Biormas, or "Bear-men,"
who dwelt on the White Sea.

A great festival to the Bear-god was held
annually by nearly every nation of the North, accompanied by rites connected
with the worship of ancestral spirits. In Ireland the festival Samhain
was the counterpart of this, as far as the worship of the Sidhe or ancestral
spirits went, and, considering the many points of similarity between Finnic
and Irish folk-lore, and the brachycephic skulls found in Irish tumuli,
I am inclined to think that a Finnic element once existed in Ireland,
and that in the name Samhain we have no mere "end of summer,"
as the word has been explained, but a survival of the same cultures of
the Finno-Ugric peoples.